a day of basketball, yes i mean a great day

exactly! a great day.

i woke up this morning and the team of americans were going to take presents to the kids at guanduleys for a birthday party of sorts but my day had a different path. after breakfast will and i headed out to the basketball court, which is called a "cancha" in spanish. i told you about the six week league that i was a coach in, well, i have practices on tuesday and all of the teams have games on saturday. having the league for six weeks is a step towards teaching these kids responsibility and dependability. hopefully. haha

so, starting at nine i reffed three games and then coached a game at 11:30. we won and i really like my team, we have some good players. and i took my camera but then i was too busy to take pictures, sorry everyone. next week i promise. then me and will came back and had lunch, i rested until two and we went back to finish reffing games.

there were only two left in the afternoon and we were done by around 4 o'clock i think.

this is a really good time for me to be bonding with those young guys.

OH OH OH OH!!!!! big news that i want you all to pray for. will has this big plan to get G.O. its own land to build courts and fields and a sports facility so that we can stop having to fix up all the courts that get destroyed because the people don't take care of them and so it becomes easier to do camps and provide space for our needs. there has been this perfect piece of land that is close by and it is amazing. large, flat, gorgeous and owned by a rich guy who doesn't need to sell it. so what was his price? thirteen million dollars U.S. outrageous! well, the praying comes in with the fact that someone just showed will a piece of land that he likes even more. i haven't seen it yet, but will likes it a lot and has even gotten the go ahead by the president of G.O., Brooke Brotzman, to go after it. the price?????? one million dollars. this is the next big step in the amazing growth that G.O. has been experiencing and right now i want you all to cover this in prayer. pray for the money, pray for the process, pray for all the kids and adults that will be reached because we will be able to expand with this land. pray hard. pleeeeeeeaaaaassssseeeee!!!!!

and keep praying for me. i love you all!!

a great day

hello friends and all. what a great day in the dominican republic. we worked in the hole today with the group. there are a couple of girls there that i hung out with for a while. like 8 year olds. i did a lot of hard work in the sun today and then i got to play basketball for a little bit. then i came back and hung out with a friend from the street. his name is raymir. we had a good time just talking. he speaks english pretty well. and then we messed around on my computer. he likes to rap and we recorded a song. he's 14 and a really great kid who doesn't have a lot of good influences to hang out with all of the time. but that's why you all have sent me down here right? lol

for the next 5 weeks i am coaching in a basketball league that will partin has set up. i like the guys on my team and our first game is saturday. we do devotions with the teams and with the coaches. it's a big out reach especially because it is teaching the kids a lot about responsibility. and we will have plenty of one on one time with them.

i am currently reading the book "Wild at Heart." and i am spending a lot of time thinking about God and my relationship to him. i guess the best place to have revelations is on a mission trip. so keep praying for me, especially right now. i have made so many great friends and have had so many opportunities to show Christ to people.

i love you all. email me sometime. brenton.bellinger@gmail.com

the boys in the hole, and the boys outside of the hole

two weeks ago from this last tuesday they arrived here. another basketball week. i was excited. the american team that was coming down was an AAU basketball team from kentucky. the guys were staying in the "chateau Gabriel" which is the name given to the new dorm connected to the church. it used to be Gabriel's house. we fixed it up right before the summer started.
the team would sleep, eat and meet there which is down the road maybe 200 ft. from the main dorm. This is a picture of the top of the chateau where the group ate. that's Isaiah just relaxin'. the team was coming to put on a basketball camp for 10 to 14 year old boys from a place called the 'Hole'. i have probably already told you what the 'Hole' is but i'll fill you in again. the Hole is the city waste dump where 600 families have taken squatter's rights and built homes. disgusting pigs walking around everywhere. crap and trash everywhere also. G.O. has a church and a pastor they partner with in the Hole that has a feeding center that feeds about 50 kids their only meal of the day 6 days a week. Felix is the pastor. and we signed up about 50 kids for the camp. not all the same kids because the church picks the worst off kids to provide the meals for, and some of them are really young. here we are in the church in the Hole signing kids up. you can see brandon towards the left and will in the middle. now, there is no court in the Hole so we decided to use one close enough for the kids to walk to. i believe it was a 5 min. walk to get to the court. which i don't have any pictures of. sorry, we worked on it too. another place that was trash when we first got there and looked like a million bucks for the camp week. the "club" manager doesn't take very good care of the courts. but it worked very well for our purposes.
so the team was going to be doing the camp and then play in a tournament we set up at night with three other teams. they were going to wear USA jerseys like all the sports teams that we bring down. this team once again was all 15 year olds.
the camp mornings went like this.

-Arrive at the club by 830 in the morning.
-Worship (maybe 3 songs)
-Get into lines and do team relays
-split up into teams and do drill stations
-do separate team competitions

and then it was break for lunch. we went and served the kids at the feeding center/church in the hole everyday before going back to eat our own food. then after the 2 hour siesta we would head back to have games at the court. most of the players on the AAU team were coaches and then the players who's teams weren't playing would referee the games. the camp would end around 4 in the afternoon. my job through all this was to help. lol, to do this here or that there. i kept score and reffed. i translated in the mornings. and i translated very very little. i was in charge of water a lot. which was actually very difficult at first. but by the end of the week i was pretty good at controlling the small riots that took place everytime someone wanted water.

then back to the dorm to get changed and a small rest. while the players were doing that though, i was in charge of loose ends and getting more water and ice for the games at night. it was a four team tournament and the americans always played the later game at 530. so i guess the game was more in the evening instead of night. which to tell you the truth, watching those games is just really hard for me. i want to play so bad. and this team was pretty good. they passed the ball exceptionally.

then at night i would sleep down at the chateau with the team so they would have a staff member there in case of an emergency. wonderfully, there are many fans and also air conditioning at the chateau. i keep calling it the coldest place in santiago. and i got lots of opportunities to talk to the kids. so it was a good week.
they ended up 2-2 after the week. they lost to a team called Sameji (Suh-may-he) once and then again in the championship game. but mostly for that team i hope that witnessing the poorness of the kids in the hole will stick with them. that they will realize more what life is actually about.

This was a trying week for me. it was hard to work with the kids in the hole because they are wild. they have never had a camp like this done for them and they haven't really learned discipline or order yet. it was hard to work with the americans because even though they were great kids they were only 15 and alot of them got distracted a lot or just didn't listen very well. the sun got so hot this week. i believe the temp got over 100 degrees a few times. and then it was hard for me to watch so much basketball and not "be" a part of it. BUT!......

It was a good week. I guess these are all things God can use to make me grow. hey thanks again everyone for reading.

you might want some mustard with this ketchup

SOOOOOOO let's go back to the big youth group that was here.

they were amazing. not only did they work like crazy but they had great attitudes and they followed directions. their leaders were on the ball and pretty much the entire week went great. like i said before i helped worked at a place called Hato del Yaque. The Yaque is a river that runs through part of Santiago. so this is a smaller part of the city near the river. it's a lot poorer than where the mission buildings are. the organization is building a church/feeding center there.

we would arrive there in the morning and spend the morning moving dirt that a big truck would leave in a big pile near the entrance. we used shovels and wheelbarrows and moved the dirt inside to raise the level of the floor. and especially the first day the group did so much work. there were also a few people working at chiseling out electric socket spaces in the concrete. and in the back corner people were bending rebar (sp).

so we would work until 12 and then take the 2 hour siesta. ahhhhh. then back to doing the same thing. and that was wednesday. thursday, will took me with him and audrey to the capital to watch audrey play in a basketball game. that was a fun trip even though audrey didn't get to play much. and brandon came that night.

then we went back to hato del yaque on friday. this time for siesta wilby took me around to talk to some people at their houses. to practice my spanish. lol, which you can't really practice when you don't know anything.

wilby by the way is a haitian translator. he speaks spanish and english along with creoul and whatever else he knows. he's a great guy. the nicest guy i know probably. and we are close friends. if you remember me talking about romano, they are actually cousins and live together here in santiago.

so my lunch time was really fun, trying to talk to some of the people. then saturday i went with will to the court and had a meeting for the 6 week league that is coming up. it was also an all star game from the big camp we just had and i got to play in it to give it more players. i had such a great time. it had been so long since i had gotten to play ball. (sigh)

then that night i played guitar for a small worship service the youth group here had with the american team. it was a lot of fun. then a sunday morning and the team was off to the beach again. it was sad to see this team go. i really like them and there was a lot of fun people, students and adults.

it was a great week for me. and there are definitely more coming i know.

another quick one

man alive, i'm gonna need to sit down here quick and fill you all in on things. but this will need to be another short one. i can't forget i need to tell you about last week and this week still.

all is going really well. i was going to go to the beach with the team today for the night but i ended up staying back. it's all good. how many times can you really go to the beach. this last week was so hot. incredibly so. we did a basketball camp for the kids in the hole. the hole is the city dump pit where 600 families have taken squatters rights. a really bad place. a team of 15 year olds on an AAU basketball team from kentucky came down. this was the first kind of thing like this ever done for these kids. yeah, they didn't know very much discipline but the week went well. i'll find time to write more about it later. thanks for reading. i love you all.

something short

i won't give you the whole week with this blog. but the huge ginormous youth group has been here all week. sixty two people. crazy. but a lot of fun. major points of the week........i helped with construction in a place called Hato del Yaque, and i'll explain more about that later. Brandon Yohn arrived this week. he'll be here for six weeks as an intern. he went to college with me. a really cool guy. i went to the capital, Santo Domingo, to watch audrey play basketball, and i'll have pictures of that later. OHHH!! and i don't have the beard anymore. that's a big deal. hahaha, okay, maybe not. alright, i'll explain a bunch of this tomorrow.

the big basketball week

Wow, a week with out blogging. i'm sorry guys. i hope you haven't gotten tired of checking the blog and there not being anything new. well, i should write your eyes off with this one.

what a week. just amazing. this was the big week that we even had a preparatory week only for it. 200 kids in the camp, a team of 26 americans coming down. basketball camp in the morning, basketball camp in the afternoon and basketball games at night. basketball basketball basketball. i now believe more than ever that God is down here.

i was orginally going to be a facilitator running around with Will to check on the five courts spread out through the city, but then at the last moment before the team came one of the guys dropped out and i was assigned to be a coach of a team for the week. there were 5 divisions with 4 teams in each division. the divisions were the NBA for 18 years and up, the dominican pro league for 15 to 17, college for 13 and 14 years, and the little man league for 12 and under and i don't think there were supposed to be kids under 10. oh, and the fifth division was the girls division. it was a hundred pesos to get into the league (which is about 3 dollars) and they get a nice bag and a good ball at the end of the week. that was all brought by the americans. i think there is a NIKE rep that donated the balls. i was a coach in the little man division. each team had a different color in their division. red, blue, yellow and green. my team was green. and they were incredible. they weren't the best players ever, even though a few of them were pretty good, but what i loved about them most was that they were good kids. i really tried to be positive in everything i did and said and i believe that they saw that and followed suit. they really worked as a team. as an example, one morning when all the little man teams got to their court for the day we sent the teams to different parts of the court and i was talking with another coach for a second, when i looked over my guys had organized lay up lines and were practicing lay ups. i was so blown away. i saw my best player encouraging my worst player when he missed a shot. i was so blessed.

every morning this week started for me with breakfast with the american team, and then to the main court, club benito juarez, at 8 to 8:30. there the entire camp would have announcements a small message and worship. then each division would walk to its court. there we would have stations to teach dribbling, defense, shooting and passing. there would also be team competitions and individual competitions. my team won every team competition in our division. at the end of the week ribbons were given to the teams and my team got all of the ribbons. and a bunch of my players won some of the individual competitions. my best player was also a big help to me. he would try and understand what i was telling the team to do and then he would tell everyone what to do. his name was jose argeni (hose-ay ar-heh-knee) but i had another jose so i just called him argeni all week. it was his idea, hahaha. what a great kid. i really love him. i also had a couple other good players. one was richard, he was a haitian and he could dribble really well and he was really quiet. the other good player was jean marcus something. that's 4 players if you count the other jose, who was a little bit of a troubled child. he had trouble learning the memory verses and sometimes with getting along but another blessing that i had and i believe also it was because i tried to keep a positive attitude was that all the other coaches said constantly all week that my team had the best attitude as a whole. so argeni, richard, marcus, jose and the other four were jeuri, a really short guy who was really passionate, edgar who was a sweet little kid that kept forgetting to play defense and always begged to not be subbed out, wilson, who wasn't the skinniest kid but had a great attitude and memorized the most verses, and lastly, cristofer who was my youngest, tallest and most bothersome child. he constantly asked if he could go in. but not every few minutes, not once in a while, but constantly every three seconds. touching my arm, can i go in, can i go in, can i go in. it was in spanish but it was easy enough to understand. and then when i would put him, he would keep asking, am i in? am i in? do you mean me? OH MY GOODNESS KID, YES!!!!!! he wasn't good either, but he taught me a few things. i kept him telling him he had to play defense and by the end of the week he really hustled. he really didn't get better, but he was trying and it reminded me i was out there to encourage the kids so i made it a point that everytime he got a rebound or did anything good i would yell and cheer for him.

so in the mornings we would do the drills and such, then we would break for lunch. at 2 everyone was supposed to be back at their courts. then we would play games. we lost our first and won our second on a buzzer beater the first day. yeah, argeni made a lay up with one second left to go up by one. that was exciting, he ran to the side line and i hugged him and spun around. it was great. the next day we went one and one again, but i could just feel that we were getting better. i can't remember how we finished with our record that last day but it was set up tournament style and we won the right one and were going to play in the championship in the afternoon.

the little man championship was the first game at the main court in the afternoon. we were tied at 24 with 30 seconds left and my team had the ball. they were passing the ball around and it finally got to jose, the guy who could be like sand paper at times. everyone on the team yelled for him not to shoot, not only was he not one of the best players but he was outside the 3-point line. he had a moment of deffness and shot the ball anyway it hit the rim and bounced in the air. it bounced on the rim two more times and went in. so with 10 seconds left the other team dribbled the ball down and missed a shot and my team won the championship also. it was so wild. i had such a great time and mostly because my kids were so incredible. richard the haitian hardly ever showed emotion so i made it a point to hug him and shake him just so he would smile. oh another thing my group won was a screaming contest. the leader of the week, chris renner has a thing where he yells "CHECK YOUR ATTITUDE" and the kids yell back "GLORIA A DIOS." the divisions had a competition one morning before worship and the loudest in each division got money to buy a soda pop. i really played it up and acted like i was going to jump out of my skin and i screamed as loud as i could, my guys responded like wise and we won. so after one day i took them to a colmado and we had pops together. that was amazing too.

so i had a great week with my team. and that was basketball in the morning and basketball in the afternoon. now, for basketball at night. the group of americans that came down here are all mostly or have been in their past jocks. at least two of them had been on Will's high school basketball team that won the state championship in kentucky a few years ago. one guy had played on wake forrest. he was 6'8". and at nights they were part of a 4 team tournament with 3 dominican teams. one team was coached by pedro. that's the dominican who is in charge of basketball for the ministry with Will. there was a select team from santiago, that's the city we're in. and another team from pueblo nuevo. which i think is a part of santiago. our first night was against pueblo nuevo. the guys had flown down the night before, they were playing on the outdoor court there at club benito juarez and they had never played together as a whole before. and also i think that they didn't play Will enough that first night. he's really good at basketball and he's a really smart point guard. well needless to say, they got beat pretty badly that first night. they couldn't score and didn't look very good.

the other nights were a different story. they just played so much better and didn't lose another game. they beat the other two teams and played in the championship against pueblo nuevo again and beat them by like 20. good, way to go guys. that last night they actually played in an indoor arena because it had rained that afternoon, a lot. the indoor arena was pueblo neuvo's home court. and the girls that had come down, two were going to be sophomores at division 1 colleges in the states and they both played basketball for the teams, played a game too. we played against a team that wasn't too good. and i coached them. we beat them pretty good. the two girls, mallory from murray state and meredith from vanderbilt, were amazing. it was a lot of fun. i really didn't have to do a lot. audrey played with them, Will's wife, and she's pretty good too. she plays great defense and had a lot of steals. she also made some outside shots. Will told me afterward that when he looked down and saw me coaching the team that he thought it was going to be weird but that i looked like i belonged down there. it was so much fun for me.

it was a good end to the week. and today we went to church at edward's church. he's the oldest son of gabriel, the co-president of G.O. ministries. the drummer there had played with us at gabriel's church and he remembered that i played guitar and so he hooked up a bass guitar and told me to come up and play with him and a guy on the keyboard and another guy on a guitar. i had no idea who they were or what they were playing, and oh yeah! i don't play bass guitar. but everyone told me to go up, so i went up and it was fun. i ended up just watching what the guitar player was playing and trying to play the notes on the bass guitar. it was crazy and the music was so loud. it was good.

then we came back after a crazy message from a dominican named socrates i guess. i didn't really understand it but he was all over and had so much energy. we had lunch and the team left for the beach with Will and Audrey. i was going to wash clothes today, which i need to do, but i think something is wrong with the water pump, so i'm going to have it looked at. i'll have to explain the clothes washing process sometime. and then i guess i was exhausted because i fell asleep for 3 hours. and now i'm up and have some time to write. but soon i'm going to go have dinner with the girls.

thank you everyone for praying for me. and thank you so much for everyone who has supported me in anyway. this week especially i feel like i have been able to be used by God. i made such a great connection with those kids. so keep praying and i'll keep writing and God will keep using me. :) i love you all.